On this day in 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown. The healthy baby was delivered shortly before midnight by caesarean and weighed in at five pounds, 12 ounces.
…The Browns had a second daughter, Natalie, several years later, also through IVF. In May 1999, Natalie became the first IVF baby to give birth to a child of her own. The child’s conception was natural, easing some concerns that female IVF babies would be unable to get pregnant naturally. In December 2006, Louise Brown, the original “test tube baby,” gave birth to a boy, Cameron John Mullinder, who also was conceived naturally. 🙂

On July 26, 1908, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is born when U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte orders a group of newly hired federal investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch of the Department of Justice. One year later, the Office of the Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau of Investigation, and in 1935 it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Throw Back Thursday’s Today in History:
July 27, 1974
House begins impeachment of Nixon

(Hoping History will soon repeat itself with #POTUS45!)

On this day in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommends that America’s 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, be impeached and removed from office. The impeachment proceedings resulted from a series of political scandals involving the Nixon administration that came to be collectively known as Watergate
…After departing the White House on August 9,Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford, who, in a controversial move, pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974, making it impossible for the former president to be prosecuted for any crimes he might have committed while in office. Only two other presidents in U.S. historyhave beenimpeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998.

Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”
In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons… In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Ranger 7, an unmanned U.S. lunar probe, takes the first close-up images of the moon—4,308 in total—before it impacts with the lunar surface northwest of the Sea of the Clouds. The images were 1,000 times as clear as anything ever seen through earth-bound telescopes.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had attempted a similar mission earlier in the year—Ranger 6—but the probe’s cameras had failed as it descended to the lunar surface. Ranger 7, launched from Earth on July 28, successfully activated its cameras 17 minutes, or 1,300 miles, before impact and began beaming the images back to NASA’s receiving station in California. The pictures showed that the lunar surface was not excessively dusty or otherwise treacherous to a potential spacecraft landing, thus lending encouragement to the NASA plan to send astronauts to the moon. In July 1969, two Americans walked on the moon in the first Apollo Program lunar landing mission

August 1,1943
PT-109 sinks;
Lieutenant Kennedy is instrumental in saving crew:
On this day in 1943, a Japanese destroyer rams an American PT (patrol torpedo) boat, No. 109, slicing it in two. The destruction is so massive other American PT boats in the area assume the crew is dead. Two crewmen were, in fact, killed, but 11 survived, including Lt. John F. Kennedy.
…The message reached Lieutenant Arthur Evans, who was watching the coast of Gomu Island, located next to an island occupied by the Japanese. Kennedy and his crew were paddled to Gomu. A PT boat then took them back to Rendova. Kennedy was ultimately awarded the Navy and Marine Corps
Medal, for gallantry in action.

Of course, in addition to their sick plans to exterminate the Jewish and Roma peoples, the Nazis and allies planned to kill many Slavic people, disabled people, LGBT people,any people of colour who were around there then, and political opponents.

Sigh, thank you Lagatta for the link on Roma Genocide!
#NeverAGain
taken from article…The Nazi persecution of Roma varied from country to country and region to region. In the Balkan states and the Soviet Union, mobile killing squads travelled from village to village massacring the inhabitants and typically leaving few or no records of the number of victims. Roma were also victims of the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the Ustasa regime in Croatia. In Jasenovac concentration camp tens of thousands of Roma were killed. Yad Vashem estimates that the Roma Genocide was most intense in Yugoslavia, where around 90,000 Roma were killed. The Romanian regime did not systematically annihilate the Roma population in its territory, but deported 26.000 Roma to Transnistria, where thousands died from disease, starvation and brutal treatment.
😥

“The Macarena” begins its reign atop the U.S. pop charts
If pop songs, like hurricanes, were rated on an objective scale according to their ability to devastate the pop-cultural landscape, then the song that reached the top of the American pop charts on this day in 1996 was a Category 5 monster. It first made landfall in Florida as a seemingly harmless Spanish-language rumba, but in the hands of a pair of Miami record producers, it soon morphed and strengthened into something called “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix),” a song that laid waste to all competition during a record-setting run at #1 that began on August 3, 1996.https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+macarena+video&&view=detail&mid=1CB2D1218D91108C193E1CB2D1218D91108C193E&&FORM=VDRVRV

On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival opens on a patch of farmland in White Lake, a hamlet in the upstate New York town of Bethel.

Dairy farmer Max Yasgur gave the promoters access to his 600 acres of land in Bethel, some 50 miles from Woodstock.

By the time the gates opened on Friday, August 15, more than 400,000 people were clamoring to get in. Those without tickets simply walked through gaps in the fences, and the organizers were eventually forced to make the event free of charge. Folk singer and guitarist Richie Havens kicked off the event with a long set, and Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie also performed on Friday night.

Somewhat improbably, the chaotic gathering of half a million young “hippies” lived up to its billing of “Three Days of Peace and Music.” There were surprisingly few incidents of violence on the overcrowded grounds, and a number of musicians performed songs expressing their opposition to the Vietnam War. Among the many great moments at the Woodstock Music Festival were career-making performances by up-and-coming acts like Santana, Joe Cocker and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Who’s early-morning set featuring songs from their classic rock opera “Tommy”; and the closing set by Hendrix, which climaxed with an improvised solo guitar performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

We weren’t at the original, obviously, but we did go to see the film about a year later. I loved The Who’s set – always a favourite of mine (sigh . . . !) – but my daughter wriggled and jiggled and danced all the way through Hendrix’s session.

Which was a little uncomfortable for me – because she wasn’t born until a month later.

Seven men, including legendary all-around athlete and football star Jim Thorpe, meet to organize a professional football league at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom in Canton, Ohio. The meeting led to the creation of the American Professional Football Conference (APFC), the forerunner to the hugely successful National Football League.
Professional football first proved itself a viable spectator sport in the 1910s with the establishment of The Ohio League. Canton, the premiere team in the league, featured legendary decathlete and football star Jim Thorpe. From his play with the Carlisle School to his gold medal in the decathlon in Stockholm in 1912 and his time in the outfield with John McGraw’s New York Giants, Thorpe was an international star who brought legitimacy to professional football.

“We had just lost our cat, Me-You, who lived with us for a long time. At the suggestion of the late, great author Harold Robbins, we went to the local shelter and got Charlie Chaplin for $6.00. …when we got to Beverly Hills, Charlie was very depressed. In Beverly Hills, a $6.00 cat is not very important. He had a limp, so we took him to the vet, who said his right hind leg was out of the socket, but the surgery to repair it would be very expensive. I figured I had to protect my $6.00 investment, so we should do the surgery, which was $600.00. That made Charlie a $606.00 cat, which was very respectable for Beverly Hills.”

Feline fact: Towards the end of his life Hackett would only perform to raise money for an Animal Shelter he and his wife established in the Los Angeles area.

In Special Remembrance of All those affected by 9/11
2001 – In the U.S., four airliners were hijacked and were intentionally crashed. Two airliners hit the World Trade Center, which collapsed shortly after, in New York City, NY. One airliner hit the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. Another airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. About 3,000 people were killed 😥

On this day in 1973, in a highly publicized “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, top women’s player Billie Jean King, 29, beats Bobby Riggs, 55, a former No. 1 ranked men’s player. Riggs (1918-1995), a self-proclaimed male chauvinist, had boasted that women were inferior, that they couldn’t handle the pressure of the game and that even at his age he could beat any female player. The match was a huge media event, witnessed in person by over 30,000 spectators at the Houston Astrodome and by another 50 million TV viewers worldwide. King made a Cleopatra-style entrance on a gold litter carried by men dressed as ancient slaves, while Riggs arrived in a rickshaw pulled by female models.

On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which sets a date for the freedom of more than 3 million black slaves in the United States and recasts the Civil War as a fight against slavery.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration as America’s 16th president, he maintained that the war was about restoring the Union and not about slavery. He avoided issuing an anti-slavery proclamation immediately, despite the urgings of abolitionists and radical Republicans, as well as his personal belief that slavery was morally repugnant. Instead, Lincoln chose to move cautiously until he could gain wide support from the public for such a measure.

President George Washington signed the Judiciary Act 1789 establishing the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal made up of six justices who were to serve on the court until death or retirement. That day, President Washington nominated John Jay to preside as chief justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson to be associate justices. On September 26, all six appointments were confirmed by the U.S. Senate.